Notes

BkIV:4 The Holy Ones: Megaera, Alecto, Tisiphone:The Furies (Erinys, Erinnys, or Eumenides), The Three Sisters, were Alecto, Tisiphone and Megaera, the daughters of Night and Uranus. They were the personified pangs of cruel conscience that pursued the guilty. (See Aeschylus – The Eumenides). Their abode is in Hades by the Styx.

BkIV:4 Quirinus: The name for the deified Romulus, the son of Mars and Ilia, hence Iliades, the father of the Roman people (genitor).

BkIV:5 Hercules’s Lion: The constellation Leo the Lion. The sun’s presence there indicates that it is late July/August. The constellation and zodiacal sign of the Lion contains the star Regulus ‘the heart of the lion’, one of the four guardians of the heavens in Babylonian astronomy, which lies nearly on the ecliptic. (The others are Aldebaran in Taurus, Antares in Scorpius, and Fomalhaut ‘the Fish’s Eye’ in Piscis Austrinus. All four are at roughly ninety degrees to one another). The constellation represents the lion killed by Hercules as the first of his twelve labours.

BkIV:18 Laomedon: The king of Troy, son of Ilus the younger, father of Priam, Hesione and Antigone. He reneged on his agreement to reward Apollo (Phoebus) and Neptune for building the walls of Troy. His daughter Hesione was chained to a rock to be taken by a sea-monster. Hercules rescued her and was also denied his reward. He seized Troy and married Hesione to Telamon.

BkIV:60 Zeuxis: Chaucer calls him Zansis. Zeuxis was a Sicilian artist fl 468BC. His paintings were noted for their realism. The remark here attributed to him actually comes from Ovid’s Remedia Amoris (462).

BkIV:113 Eurydice: The wife of Orpheus. The tale of her death and Orpheus’s visit to the underworld to attempt to redeem her is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book X:1-85.

BkIV:139 (thru 154) great clerks: These stanzas are a rendering of Boethius’s Consolation Book V, prose 3, used here by Troilus to denote the power of Fate and Pre-destination and the lack of Free Will in human affairs.

BkIV:163 Myrrha: The daughter of Cinyras, mother of Adonis, incestuously, by her father. See Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book X:298-502. She conceives an incestuous passion for her father, attempts suicide, and is rescued by her nurse who promises to help her.

She sleeps with her father, is impregnated by him, and when discovered flees to Sabaea, and is turned into the myrrh-tree, weeping resin. Adonis is born from the tree.

BkIV:170 Minos: The King of Crete, ruler of a hundred cities. Son of Jupiter and Europa. With his brother Rhadamanthus Jupiter (Zeus) made him a judge of the underworld. (See Dante’s Divine Comedy)

BkIV:173 Atropos:One of the Fates (Parcae or Moerae) The Three Sisters, the daughters of Night. Clotho, the spinner of the thread of life, Lachesis, chance or luck, and Atropos, inescapable destiny. Clotho spins, Lachesis draws out, and Atropos shears the thread. Their unalterable decrees may be revealed to Jupiter but he cannot change the outcome.

BkIV:202 Delphic shrine: This refers to the oracular shrine of Apollo at Troy of which Calchas was the priest. He may also have visited Delphi in Greece or the island of Delos to consult Apollo’s oracles there and hence learnt the fate of Troy.

BkIV:209 Argus: A creature with a thousand eyes, the son of Arestor, set to guard Io by Juno. See Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Book I:622-746. He was killed by Mercury and after his death, Juno set his eyes in the peacock’s tail.

BkIV:220 Athamas: The son of Aeolus, and husband of Ino. The uncle of Pentheus. See Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book IV 512-542. Punished by Juno, his is maddened by Tisiphone and kills his child Learchus.

BkIV:222 Simois: With the Scamander (Xanthus) one of the two great rivers of Troy. (See Homer’s Iliad)

BkIV:228 Diana (Lucina in the original text): Lucina is a name for Diana as Moon Goddess. Diana is Artemis the sister of Apollo (Phoebus). The moon is here in Aries the Ram, and Cressid promises to return when it has passed through Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer that is in ten days time when the moon will be at the new in the sun-sign Leo.